Giant Snakes and Ladders Game!

Board games are an absolute favorite in our household. From Hotel to Monopoly to chopad (its like an elaborate Indian version of Ludo), we love playing them. No matter the number of people. With this in mind, my mom had the idea to supersize a games board. And she started with the idea of making a giant snakes and ladders game that everybody has played.

My mom & her friends used to organize elaborate game nights for our community and this snakes and ladders idea was such a huge success! People of all ages were cheering and playing for hours. You would think, its a game of chance and you can’t do much about that. But, that’s where you would be wrong (at least I was). In minutes, the players were strategizing the placement of the snakes and trying to cheat their way into winning. In a friendly way, of course!

Since then, we’ve kept the board and it’s been circulated to countless parties. Which explains why it’s so crushed. So, please excuse the photos and do let me know if you have any questions. Yes and this can be great outdoor snakes and ladders game to play too! Here’s how to make the Giant Snakes and Ladders!

Time: 2 days

Budget:Medium

You’ll need:

10 x 10 feet cloth. Cotton works best

Paints

Satin Ribbon

Pencil

Measure Tape

Scale/ ruler

Liquid Glitter Tubes (optional)

To make:

The first step, is to measure out the boxes and draw the base of the board with a pencil. We started by drawing the outermost black outline. It has to be 10 x 10 ft. Next, we made 9 markings on each side, 1 foot apart. This makes ten boxes on each side individually.Join each marking with the marking exactly opposite it. This will form a grid of 100 squares on your cloth.

Then, we write out the numbers in each box. What’s important is that the numbers are more or less the same size. And the order of the numbers is correct. The correct order is like an “S”. You start with 1,2,3 from the left and move rightwards. Then start from 11,12,13 from the right and move leftwards. The number 100 is in the topmost left square.

With the squares in place, we now start drawing the snakes and ladders. Here, you can get as creative as you would like. You can change the length and movement of the snakes. Change directions and the number of spaces covered for the ladders. I would recommend, keeping the design simple and not making horizontal figures, as they disrupt gameplay. We made 8 snakes and ladders and made sure the mouths of the snakes and the top/bottom of the ladders are not on the same square.

At this stage, the board is drawn up and we can get started on the painting. You can choose, to paint the entire board (lines first, numbers second, snakes & ladders third). Or, if like us, you don’t feel confident about painting straight lines, you can follow these steps.

Paint the numbers and the snakes. We used bright colors, which wouldn’t spoil badly when stepped over.

Next we stretched black satin ribbon and pasted it the grid. This has to be done after the snakes have been painted. Because, you can’t paint neatly over satin ribbon.

Lastly, we stuck red satin ribbon on the ladders.

To give more finish to the snakes, you can use liquid glitter to add a thin border. You can also paint black outlines in step 1, if you prefer that.

You Should:

Ask people to play without shoes if possible. As our board will show, once dirty and crushed, it’s difficult to clean up.

Be careful about the numbering and placement.

Use thick cloth for the base. You can use paper, but it would spoil with age and isn’t s convenient to store.

For the dice, any square box can be wrapped with paper and written over (1 opposite 6, 2 opposite 5 and 3 opposite 4)

Which board game would you like to see customised or sized up? Let us know and we’ll try our best to make it happen! Hope you liked this DIY on Giant Snakes and Ladders Game.

6 thoughts on “Giant Snakes and Ladders Game!”

This is so awesome! I am in the middle of recreating this for my library programs, and I was stressing about how to draw the snakes! This really helps! I decided to make mine only 42 squares to keep the game moving pretty fast and also to better fit all ages we made each square 20 inches. I’d love to see candy land or any other giant board game! Do you know anything about copyright issues with recreating this in giant size?

Thank you so much Becky I’m so glad that it’s been helpful! Definitely share a picture with me, when you’re playing the game. It’s a ton of fun! Also, I would love to make another giant board, thanks for the Candy land idea!

As far as copyrights go, I like to think of making games, as I would think of music covers i.e we don’t claim to have come up with the idea or the game. But, we’re doing our own version of it. Also, we don’t sell the idea or technique that we used. So, I think that makes it alright to do